I need a holiday to recuperate from my holiday

Actually, I had the whole day today to recuperate and it was perfect because I was able to do laundry, download pictures, catch up on e-mails, and plan my lesson for tomorrow. I am peeling from a sunburn and sneezing from a cold. How the two go together I am not really sure but I am suffering from both. The sunburn is from biking in the countryside, even though I applied sunscreen several times throughout the day but seemed to miss the tops of my hand, and the cold ...well I am not sure where I picked that up. I have so many pictures (over 600) and so many stories to tell.
Deanna and I spent the last 9 days in Yunnan Province learning about the different cultures in China and climbing some incredible mountains. Yunnan Province neighbors Tibet and Guangxi and is north of Vietnam. Kunming is the Capital city of Yunnan Provicne and the first stop on our itinerary. From the airport we climbed into a taxi headed off to our hostel, or so we thought. The taxi driver just kept driving and driving and driving and clearly did not understand where we wanted to go. We had the phone number of the hostel and had the taxi driver talk to the reception. Apparently, the hostel was quite far outside of town and they didn’t even have our reservation. After some hand gestures and Deanna’s basic Mandarin the taxi driver drove us back to the airport. It took some time, probably an hour, to negotiate the price down for the 'taxi ride to nowhere' but managed with the help of a nice lady at the airport. The meter read 100RMB but we ended up paying him 20RMB.
After dropping our luggage off at a hostel in the city we headed to Yunnan Nationalities Museum. There are 56 ethnic groups represented in China and 23 of them are from the province of Yunnan. Each ethnic group has their own traditional costume and customs. The free English tour guide at the museum was a great source of information and we learned many interesting stories about Chinese culture. More of those stories to come later...but I will leave with this...What do pleated skirts, foxes, and umbrellas have to do with each other?
Sleeper busses in China are very common because you are able to travel through the night and arrive somewhat rested. The busses are the same size as a Greyhound bus but does not have any seats only bunk-beds. There are three sets of bunk-beds across with two aisles that are no wider than your shoulders. You have to turn sideways to walk down the aisles. The beds are really skinny with only about 2 inches on either side of you hips. Each bus as approximately 36 beds two of which are for the two drivers. We took the sleeper bus to Dali and arrived very early in the morning but were allowed to stay on the bus to sleep until a decent hour, if you call 6am a decent hour. We met some other foreigners on the bus, several from France and a guy from Quebec, and caught the local bus together into the Old City of Dali. Dali, located on the mountain side, is an historic town that is composed of two parts the old city and the new city. Old Dali is a miniature walled city with cobblestone streets and traditional chinese architectures.

To be continued...
(More to come about biking the countryside in Dali)